When we went to the beach at the beginning of September, I devoured three books. I read Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, Justice,Justice Shalt Thou Pursue by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Amanda L. Tyler, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. I loved all three of these very different books. I haven’t read that same way since then.1 I’ve plowed through material for school. I’ve wasted time on Instagram (more on that later, probably for paid subscribers). I’ve slowly kept working through The Silmarillion. But nothing’s captured my attention in an unstoppable way.
Until last weekend. I picked up a copy of How To Stay Married at my favorite local bookstore which truly is one of my favorite places in Lynchburg. I had been to the dentist and I darted in for just a few minutes, which is a much safer amount of time to browse a bookstore than, say, an hour. I started reading it toward the weekend and since I take my sabbath break from Friday noon to Saturday noon pretty seriously, I had plenty of time to work on it.
I was hooked. It was devastating from the start. And when, toward the middle of the book, it seemed like a fairy tale ending had occurred I was reasonably suspicious. After all, the fairy tale ending is the ending of the story. Nobody is sticking around for a longer version of “they lived happily ever after.” Key’s wife had an affair. They reconciled. They recommitted—to each other and to God. It was beautiful. Then the pandemic happened and everything fell apart in ways it had not before.
Key didn’t write the book to make his wife look bad. Though she does look bad at many parts of the story, I was moved with deep compassion for her. He refrains from blaming his wife alone for everything that happened. I about lost it when I realized he was going to alphabetically and unsparingly list his flaws in a book that will linger for posterity. Nevertheless, despite the whole sordid story of them both, they are still married. Toward the end of the book, he writes,
It’s easy to forgive Chad. The sickening truth, which I cannot deny, is that, despite my hateful proclivity to compare this man to Pepsi products, he showed her kindness. He was kind to her, not in the big and most important ways, but in the small and most important ways. He listened. He laughed. He was kind at exactly the right time, in exactly the right way, when our marriage was weakest, and his kindness fertilized a genuine friendship into a terrible infatuation that grew desperately unkind. Lauren probably made our marriage sound hellish to him. He must have convinced himself he was saving a woman from hell. But he was wrong. The hell they imagined became a real hell for all of us. It’s easy to forgive someone you’ll probably never see again.
Forgiving Lauren is much harder. I see this woman every day. She’s right there in the bed next to me, a bed we once again share. I would like to forget all she did and said, but for some reason God is not allowing me to forget just yet. He wants me to listen.
There’s a part of me that would like to suggest all engaged couples read How to Stay Married and You Could Make This Beautiful, which is easily one of my top three books of the year. Often we present marriage as something that can be perfect, or close to it, if you will simply follow these steps, but what we find is that we can’t make anyone else, even our spouse, do what we want. Marriage is risk.
Midweek, I felt an urge to pick up Stained Glass Ceilings which has been sitting on my shelf for months a year, ever since Scot McKnight talked about it on his substack. Lisa Weaver Swartz is a sociology professor who focuses on religion and gender and she did a project on Southern Seminary and Asbury Theological Seminary and their stories on gender. I finished it in under eighteen hours, during which time I also got a full night’s sleep. I was riveted.
I would have said that Southern’s stories couldn’t have surprised me. I spent years living just a short way down the road from Southern, attending an SBC church. For the most part I was ready. My mouth did fall open a few times though and I took a picture of part of the book and texted it to my husband. She quotes a seminary student at Southern:
I have the burden of knowing what’s going on with the household. I’ll give you a story to illustrate. [My wife] was in the elevator with some of her coworkers and they were talking about paychecks and stuff. She said, “I don’t even know how much I make.” And they’re like, “What?!” And she said, “My husband takes care of all of that.” And then they got closer to the bottom and they asked, “Didn’t you bring an umbrella today?” She’s like, “No, my husband didn’t tell me I needed it.” So even though she’s going to work, there was still a headship there.
Her illumination of life at Asbury was much more interesting to me. Asbury fully supports women in church leadership and women’s equality to the point of “gender blindness.” Now I am curious if they openly subscribe to gender blindness or if the author is attributing that to them (rightly, from what I read). However their support of women was individualistic. There were no conversations of why they had fewer women applicants for professor positions. There was no analysis of why it is harder for women to “own” their callings to ministry. Or explanations of why we need to be taught in the faith by both men and women. To do these would have been to have gendered conversations and would have seemingly been against their own culturally unspoken rules. Their attitudes toward women and feminism ran parallel with their attitudes toward people of color and racial justice. Of course they should be equal but let’s not get carried away in analyzing why they aren’t treated equally or actively advocating for their promotion. She writes,
Like the Methodist women preachers of the nineteenth century, when the pioneering women of Asbury’s past were granted access to spaces and roles already defined by men, they did not necessarily gain the right to make structural adjustments to accommodate their own lives, or to forge new paths toward leadership that would be more accessible to more women. They undoubtedly found creative ways to bring their own sensibilities to their work and to derive meaning and empowerment from it, as other enterprising women had done throughout American religious history, but theirs are not the contributions that have publicly driven the institution forward.
A few pages later, she continues, “By itself, it fails to acknowledge the constraints that frame women’s lives. Nor does it suggest that women’s knowledge and experiences should actively shape biblical interpretation, leadership structures, and liturgies of worship.”
The book was a fascinating analysis. If you’re even slightly interested in the topics of gender and power and the church, you should pick it up. It’s made me think a lot about how we pretend we’ve made space for women but we’ve only made space for women who can inhabit the world like men do. We haven’t spent much time making space for women to inhabit the world as women. There’s a tiny writing idea that remains in the back of my mind. I’ve made tremendous work on it while walking to pick up kids from school; unfortunately, by the time I’ve returned home, the force of my idea has been lost. In the idea I maintain that when I see people talk about how men and women are different, I want less reference to power and authority2 and more conversation about our embodiment and our cultural structures. I want to talk about periods and energy cycles, not in derogatory ways, but in ways that honor what we bring to the world and the different phases we live in. I want to talk about mother-centered childbirth practices instead of practitioner-centered ones. I want to talk about the racial disparity in maternal/infant health. I want to hear concerns about health/medical research that centers on men and doesn’t include women. I want to talk about the second shift, or the idea that women will work or go to school and still carry the mental load of the home. I want to see intentional inclusion of women. I want us to state the need for theology by women and leadership and teaching from women. I want us to call out meetings where men talk more—or over—the women and I want us to care about why that happens.
I could keep going but now I’ve branched off into another conversation. If you’ve picked up a book lately that you couldn’t put down, please share it with me!
This may just be life and not a critique of my reading choices. After all, reading on vacation should be different from reading while navigating seminary and work and kids’ schedules and family life.
I believe that women have the same inherent power and authority that men do as humans made in God’s image. Obviously the structures of the world have prevented that from being lived out.
I want to hear more of your thoughts on the second shift and mental load. And I’m fascinated by the conversation about #tradwives. HTSM and YCMTPB are a great pairing for sure.
No books to share, only an echo of a desire to talk about - and hear you talk about - gender equality in the church and the realities that keep that from happening, even in egalitarian spaces.
This might be tricky, but I’d love to eventually hear about your experience (and others!) as a female pastor and how you’ve, consciously or subconsciously, had to adapt or accommodate to the religious and cultural systems you’re a part of and how that’s impacted your ministry, marriage, and family life.